Professor Jodi Skipper is the most recent recipient of the Mississippi Humanities Council’s Humanities Scholar Award and was selected as one of eight recipients of the national Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship this month.
Skipper, a Lafayette, Louisiana, native, has taught anthropology and Southern studies on campus since 2011. She was recognized this year for her work educating students about slavery with the local educational project, Beyond the Big House: Interpreting Slavery in Local Communities.
Since 2016, the Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship has annually awarded eight American educators with $50,000 fellowships to “pursue a public-facing project,” according to its website. Skipper earned her spot in the foundation’s 2017 class with her proposed plan to connect the organizers of different education-focussed grassroots organizations, like Behind the Big House, across the country.
“So [we are bringing] people generally interested in interpreting slavery in the state together to talk about how to best do that or more effectively help local people to do that,” Skipper said.
Holly Springs homeowners Jenifer Eggleston and Chelius Carter founded Behind the Big House in 2012 after discovering their new, antebellum-era home was once an operating plantation.
“So when they moved in, Chelius, who is a historic architect, recognized that the place identified as a shed by some was obviously a kitchen,” Skipper said. “There is a fireplace there. There are separate quarters, like apartments and also a loft space with a solid floor. This logic led him to believe that this is probably where their enslaved persons slept.”
Eggleston and Carter learned from the slave census schedules that between 1850 and 1860, the family who owned the home had nine slaves. The duo met with other property owners in the city who had similar units on their properties and began the program to interpret those properties.
Skipper said the Beyond the Big House project now provides tours of the historic sites in Holly Springs with the goal of educating people about the experiences of enslaved people. She has been involved with the program since 2012 and plans to use her fellowship to further its effect on Mississippi. The National Humanities Alliance also supports the Beyond the Big House strategy, once calling it a “model for collaborative, publicly engaged work.”
The Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship’s website states its fellowships are awarded to make exploratory grants to a few broader efforts to make a place in the world for humanities research, teaching and public engagement, and Skipper’s intentions meet this description.
“The goal of that program is to bring people in education, private property owners, other types of grassroots movements like the Behind the Big House program, together,” Skipper said.
The fellowship foundation is funding a one semester sabbatical for Skipper and contributing $10,000 toward the development of her project, which will begin this fall and continue through next spring.
Skipper’s research on the topic of slavery also earned her the Mississippi Humanities Council’s Humanities Scholar Award. Skipper said the council recognizes public humanities work and scholars who work with local communities. She was awarded during a ceremony at the Old Capitol Museum in Jackson in February as the sole 2017 recipient.
“I was awarded for that work [with Behind the Big House] and more broadly for helping to expand the narrative on slavery in the state of Mississippi,” she said.
